This is a stupid question because no one would ever want to do such a silly thing.

Except me.

Why?

I just happend to have both guitars and didn`t like either. (Do you know that feeling that you have to buy a guitar BECAUSE it is so ugly or beat up or
totally mis-modded? You buy it because you feel sorry for it...

No, YOU would never do that, right? Not everyone suffers from the same neurosis.)

I bought this ugly guitar used and out of pitty fom a very friendly lady who helped out for her husband in his small guitar shop while he was away. As I
was paying he came in and went straight away to the backroom witout a word. I didn`t get it. We knew each other but he didn`t seem to be glad he had sold the guitar. His wife went to see after
him and when she came back to me, she was fighting against tears.

A Hofner Shorty (almost) like this was sold to me uptown by a guy called Mitchy. Used and way too expensive. I alway thought that this guitar really
sucks because it is very neck-heavey and becaus there is no way to rest your right arm on it while you try to play... But all I wanted anyway was this mahogany neck.

It used to be very difficult to find a mahogany bolt on Gibson-scale neck in the early days during the ice age, when I was still young and
naive...

I never liked the Kramer. It was terribly heavey, neck heavey as well and had this cold aluminum neck with a phenolic fretboard. And it was so
terribly ugly, too! So, basically, I sawed it into three pieces and replaced the middle one by this Hofner Shorty that had to be adapted to this purpose too. unfortunately I can`t show you any
photos here since photography hadn`t been invented yet (Or no one had told me about it!)

The only surviving picture of this terrible misdeed is this part of my little Framus-Comic.

You can see the already heavily modded Kramer body which I had dyed red and how it "wraps around" the brown Hofner Shorty body.

The whole thing then was routed on top and from the back to make it thinner and then got sandwiched between two layers of basswood. And then I glued a
nice, lightely flamed walnut top on it. How sick can things be that you do with epoxy?!

But I was still young ... and driven by the fear I might not be able to build a nice guitar body from scratch. I thought I might never be able to rout a
decent neck- or pickup pocket and it would be SIMPLER to do it thos way... OMG. Simpler? It proved to be much, much, much more com-pli-ca-ted.

From the back you can see the basswood and the rest of the original Kramer walnut body.Some gold paint hides the mahogany middle part from the Hofner
Shorty. There is a hole left from my search for the best spot for the strap pin.

then there is my very first attempt to do an inlay.It is the original Kramer body shape but reversed in order to fit inthe body shape as it is seen from
the back... Headstock and bridge were made from aluminum, neck is ebony, body is walnut - just like the original.

On the top right you can see some pear wood. This is where I had to fix a a little top router accident. I`m glad I still have all my
fingers.

Another hole tesifying the never ending search for the perfect location of the strap pins... You can see the sandwiched woods and also how the brown
colour that I used to hide some goofing has not aged the same way as the wood. They used to have the same colour - years ago. But now you can see easily where I fucked up.

See if you can find out where the strap pin finally ended up. It works perfectly and the light instrument is very well balanced in front of my
paunch.

The plug is stuck inside a Tele-style barrel knob, something I have never seen before.The layout of these five knobs looks good, I think, but the
three-way blade switch in the middle is misplaced. One more thing that I wouldn`t do again.

Neck and bridge volumes and then neck and bridge tone controls (from right to left). The tone pots are push-pulls, switching every humbucker individually
between series and parallel mode.

DiMarzio Tone Zone at the bridge and Fast Track at the neck, which may be a bit too strong for this position.

Schaller mini locking keys and a layer of walnut wood in front and in the back of the original Shorty headstock. They were necessary to hide where all
the basswood parts had to be added in order to mistransform the headstock shap into something that fitted the adventurous body shape.

You can see very well the thick acrylic finish that I applied ruthlessly with a giant bristle brush.

That`s the way to do it, dude!

And don`t forget that I did all this because I thought it might be EASIER to transform a guitar (or two) than to build a new one!